An original Arduino-controlled anaerobic bioreactor packed with biochar as a porous filter media

Bioreactors are commonly used apparatuses generally equipped with several built-in specifications for the investigation of biological treatment studies. Each bioreactor test may require different types of specialty such as heating, agitation, re-circulation and some further technologies like online sensoring. Even thought, there are many ready-to-use fabricated bioreactors available in the market with a cost usually over than 1000 €, it is often not possible to access those advanced (but inflexible) systems for many students, young-researchers or small-scale private R&D companies. In this work, a new low cost (≈100€) packed-bed anaerobic bioreactor was developed, and all methodological details including open-source coding and 3D design files are shared with informative descriptions. Some preliminary tests were conducted to verify the developed bioreactor system's credibility in terms of leak-tightness, accurate gas monitoring, temperature controlling, and mass balance (COD-eq) coverage, which all have shown a very promising performance.•A consistent model bioreactor that will be called as "tetrapod" was developed for anaerobic treatment of challenging substrates such as pyrolytic liquids.•Coarse biochar grains were used as an organic packing material to stimulate the microbial bioconversion by increasing the active surface area for the attached-growth anaerobic mixed microbial culture (MMC).•An open-source Arduino based digital gasometer was developed for online monitoring of biogas change in the lab-scale system. Arduino was also used as a digital controller for maintaining pulse-mode liquid recirculation of the bioreactor.